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July 3, 2011

What Strauss-Kahn and His Accuser Risked

Amy Davidson

When Dominique Strauss-Kahn was first accused of raping a hotel housekeeper, who said that he had attacked her when she walked into his suite to clean it, one of the questions people asked was why he would risk such a thing. Didn’t a man in his position have a great deal to lose? He did; so, as it turned out, did she, to the extent that she may be facing criminal charges, even as he has been released on his own recognizance, though the case is still pending for now. Whatever calculation Strauss-Kahn made when he decided to engage in what all sides agree was a sexual encounter of some sort between strangers, it seems that he knew more than she did about the danger and its management. (He had pleaded not guilty, but his defense was expected to be that there had been consensual sex.) Strauss-Kahn also may have known something that the woman knew just as well or better, something that may have taken the D.A.’s office longer than it should have to figure out: people have complicated lives.

Whatever happened in that suite, the housekeeper was, as we now know, a risk-taker. As the Times first reported, the prosecution learned that she hadn’t told the truth to them, or to immigration authorities, or to either, about the life she had in Guinea, including an allegation that soldiers raped her (she now says the circumstances of the rape were different). At some point, she seems to have weighed the hazard, or just deprivation, of staying in Africa against the risk of lying on an asylum application; and then, when she was interviewed by prosecutors, the risk of sticking to a false story against telling a new one. What upset the prosecutors, apparently, was that she lied to their faces. But either option would have hurt her on the witness stand. (Strauss-Kahn’s team had investigators checking her background.) Once she lied to get out of Guinea, was she no longer credible as a rape victim in this country? And how vulnerable does that mean any imperfect woman is?

Once she got to the Bronx, as a single mother, she also took risks that don’t, from the outside, look like smart ones: claiming a friend’s child as a dependent on her own tax returns; understating her income to keep public housing; depositing or allowing others to deposit questionable amounts of cash into her bank account; paying bills to multiple cell-phone companies. (One might think about one’s own participation in cash economies—paying nannies, for example—and how the things we each are least proud of in our own lives would sound in court.) The person in Strauss-Kahn’s life with money is his wife, Anne Sinclair, and her wealth, inherited from a grandfather who dealt in Picassos, has done much to shield him from danger. His accuser was reportedly involved with a man who is now in an immigration prison in Arizona, after being picked up for trafficking marijuana. If she ever saw him as a protector, he isn’t one now.

The prosecutors were particularly shaken by the Arizona prison’s recording of a phone call the woman made to the man a day after the incident—and perhaps they were right to be. “A well-placed law enforcement official" told the Times that in it “She says words to the effect of, ‘Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing’ ” But I’d reserve judgment on that one, at least in terms of the truth of what happened in the hotel suite. First, her lawyer said that in the same call she repeated her story; second, I’m not sure that what a woman would say to calm down an allegedly criminal boyfriend is all that dispositive; and the conversation was in what the official told the Times was a “unique dialect of Fulani,” obscure enough that it had taken prosecutor until this week to get a translation. Anyone who followed the wildly conflicting linguistic testimony in the Forest Hills Bukaharan-dentist-murder case—and anyone who didn’t should read Janet Malcolm’s great account—will remember how tricky those dialects can be in court.

Here is something else that the New York Post found very suspicious: “The woman also had ‘a lot of her expenses—hair braiding, salon expenses—paid for by men not related to her,’ the source said.” The source, “close to the defense investigation,” called the woman a prostitute—an angle the Post has pushed. (Caption Sunday: “The infamous Sofitel maid/hooker.”) Indeed, the Post has gone further, allowing defense sources to suggest that prostitution is a recognized aspect of a maid’s profession, and that the hotel workers’ union is a sort of institutional procuress that sent her to the Sofitel because she was an “earner.” (The union strongly denies it.) That insults thousands of other women who work hard cleaning up after hotel guests.

But the Post’s story may be a look at what the defense had planned before it knew how little work it would have to do to discredit her. Its challenge was explaining why the housekeeper would decide to engage in consensual sex with Strauss-Kahn, whom she had just met pushing a cleaning cart, and not, say, while he was charming guests at a party in Paris. To review: the woman was found by her supervisor, apparently distraught, with what forensic tests showed was Strauss-Kahn’s semen on her clothes. One new discrepancy is that there was a longer interval than she’d told a grand jury between that point and whatever had happened—she had even begun cleaning another suite. Was she, as her lawyer suggests, simply in shock—fearing for her job? The Post’s defense source has another scenario: that she was processing a “humiliating exchange” in which she had oral sex with Strauss-Kahn, who then “refused to pay” for her services:


“There was an expectation of money after the fact, but he was dismissive,” the source said.

And not gently, the source said—D.S.K. brushed off the maid’s request as he turned his back and got dressed.

This may be pure fantasy. (There were also indications of a physical struggle.) But if, for the sake of argument, it is the gospel truth, what picture would we be left with? Is the image of a wealthy man deciding that there was little risk in not paying a prostitute or, for that matter, in using one, all that attractive? For a man whose own side is telling reporters that he did what Eliot Spitzer did—except that Spitzer paid what he owed—Strauss-Kahn has looked awfully pleased with himself since being released from house arrest. (He and Sinclair took in an exhibit at MOMA today.) Observers, and I’d include myself, have erred in assuming this case was simpler than it is. Still, the word “vindication,” which has been thrown around quite a bit, is a deeply odd one. After the woman was called a liar by the prosecutor’s office, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Strauss-Kahn’s philosopher friend, was out proclaiming victory. In his earlier defense of Strauss-Kahn, Levy relied on notions of privilege that remain unattractive, and also cheaply disparaged a French journalist who has said for years that Strauss-Kahn attacked her, and for whom no one has yet come up with a boyfriend in a prison in Arizona. According to the Guardian, Lévy told Le Parisien that Strauss-Kahn had been “lynched” by the “friends of minorities” in the U.S. He said that because the victim was “poor and immigrant” she had been presumed innocent, and because Strauss-Kahn was “powerful” he had been presumed guilty.

Friends of minorities? Is it simply that Lévy misjudges, rather profoundly, the precarious positions in which poor and powerless woman in America—or in Guinea, or anywhere—can find themselves? He does seem very worried about the risks to powerful men; but perhaps he needn’t be.

Amy Davidson is a senior editor at The New Yorker.

The New Yorker © 2011 Condé Nast Digital



What prostitute doesn't ask for payment in advance?